[plug] hot freeze - not a contradiction in terms

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 21:48 +0900, Ian Kent wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 20:34 +0900, Gavin Chester wrote:
> > With this hot spell I have seen my workstation emulating a windoze PC in
> > the sense that twice today without warning it has lost all keyboard
> > input and apparent disc I/O so that I could not even open a VT or do
> > anything except a full reboot.  
> > 
> > I suspect the heat is causing disc problems and perhaps my box is not
> > ventilated well enough, but I can't find anything in /var/log/messages
> > at the time the latest lock-up happened.  (Aside: you may recall that I
> > reported problems with these discs before in that the filesystem has
> > become read-only without warning)
> > 
> > Just what might I be seeing here, do you think?  Where might I look to
> > get a better understanding?
> 
> Or it could be capacitor(s) starting to dye.
> You'll know about that because after a while (hours, days or months) the
> machine will become unusable and eventually will fail the POST and won't
> boot at all. I've found the most common time for this to happen is
> summer time, probably because of the increased operating temperature.
> 
> Faulty caps are easily spotted (a bulging or a browny colour on the top
> of the cap can) and apparently easy enough to replace but I have yet to
> repair a motherboard myself.

Ewwwhh!  Hopefully that's an absolute worst, worst case scenario that
rarely happens :-(

Gavin